Semantic Web Rules: Fundamentals, Applications, and Standards

Introduction

The area of semantic rules is perhaps the most important frontier
today for the Semantic Web's core technology and standards. Recent
progress includes major initial industry standards from W3C and OMG,
and fundamental advances in the underlying knowledge representation
techniques in declarative logic programs, including most recently for
efficient higher-order defaults with sound integration of first order
logic ontologies (OWL). Recent progress also includes methods to use
rules for, or with, more expressive OWL ontologies; increasing
integration of rules with query/search in SPARQL and relational
databases; substantive translations between heterogeneous types of
commercial rule engines; development of open-source tools for
inferencing and interoperability; performance benchmarking of rule
systems; a wide range of emerging applications including in business,
science, and trust; and accelerating industry investments/acquisitions
in the technology including by integrated software companies such as
Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. This tutorial will provide a comprehensive
and up-to-date introduction to these developments and to the
fundamentals of the key technologies and outstanding research issues
involved. It will explore example application scenarios, overall
requirements and challenges, and touch upon business/social value and
strategy considerations.

Audience

Most ISWC attendees, especially those interested in rules and
their applications in Semantic Web, ontologies, querying of RDF and
relational data, business on the Web, services on the Web. This
includes researchers interested in core technologies, and developers
interested in standards and applications, as well as those interested
in closely related areas such as query, search, question answering,
natural language processing, collective intelligence, ontologies,
policies, trust, security, wikis, e-commerce, financial services, and
biomedical.

The tutorial will cater to those first learning about semantic web rules,
as well as those who already have some background in them. It will
assume only background knowledge of:

basics of logical knowledge representation: first order logic and relational DBMS; and